What’s wrong with the media? They have failed to give any real, meaningful coverage to the struggle for gay rights in our nation, an issue that has been highly politicized by the right.

Okay, I promise not to make my blog all about gay rights for the next, God-knows-how-long period of time. But I do think this is an issue that needs some serious, meaningful attention that it is not getting.

Many years ago, as I contemplated a run for the presidency of my state professional association, I took a Dale Carnegie course to improve my speaking skills. It was the best $300 I ever spent. I learned more about human nature in that eight – or maybe it was twelve – weeks than I had in all my young life up to that point. I still hold to its tenets in my daily actions. Dale Carnegie, in his bestseller book “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” had a very simple over-all message. If you want to persuade people to see things your way, you must make them see what’s in it for them. What a thought! He encouraged his readers to become good listeners, thus finding out what was important to the other person BEFORE you told them what was important to you. In the next five years, as I climbed the ladder I had set as my goal exactly on the schedule I had set out for myself, I found that advice to be the greatest I ever received anywhere.

When that five years was over, I found myself having to debate a powerful opponent who held the fate of my profession in his hands. It fell to me, a court reporter who had silently sat behind the little machine, to make the case for my profession’s future in Texas. We started out in a hole, but when the dust settled a few years later, we had saved many jobs and shown a path to victory for our fellow court reporters across the United States. It was time consuming, but it wasn’t all that hard. I simply listened to our end users, attorneys and judges, and took their concerns to heart. I then went to my own people and listened to them as they explained their fears about a new technology, computers, and assured them through my own experience how much better it would be for them to embrace that technology. It worked.

When dealing with any issue, one must look at both sides of the argument and offer something to each which is in their own best interest. That brings me to today’s headline question. Who among us would want to see our daughter marry a closeted gay man? Of course, no one would say that they do. But as we continue to force an invisible minority of our population to conceal themselves and assert that they somehow have a choice about something that is at the core of their being, we expose our sons and daughters to this very real threat to their future happiness. I fully realize that many who are Christians truly believe that homosexuality is a very bad thing. But according to St. Paul, so is overeating. Read your New Testament, and it’s right there. So is bearing false witness. Read your Old Testament, and it’s right there. In fact, that last one is a biggie – God’s own Top Ten.

All I am trying to say here is that nobody is asking Christians to abandon their beliefs and live a homosexual lifestyle for themselves. But many Christians are asking the rest of us to live their lifestyle whether we agree or not. In fact, they want to write it into the laws. There is another hidden truth here. Almost everybody knows someone in their family or outside their family, or perhaps both, who is a homosexual. What many don’t know is who that person is. The societal stigma against admitting one’s homosexuality is so great that many hide it from nearly everyone they know. Because I am known as the liberal in my family, I have had cousins and even an aunt “come out” to me, but they have asked I keep their secret from the rest of the family. Whether or not you know it or admit it, this is going on in your family, too.

Now, here comes the rub in all of this. Those who would hold out the opinion that this is some sort of choice are demanding that those secret, closeted homosexuals live their lives as “straight” people. Some parents, when confronted with the truth, urge their homosexual children to “try finding a good spouse and work your way out of this evil choice.” Okay, now where do they find this “good spouse”? They go to church or school or work, keeping their true natures a secret, perhaps even on the advice of clergy hoping to change them, and start dating with the idea of marriage, thus pleasing their families. And I can assure you that “their” families will not do anything to discourage this or warn the future spouse or the spouse’s family of the facts surrounding their own child. So this goes undetected for God knows how long.

Then one day, perhaps after children are brought into the picture – your grandchildren, I might add – the homosexual partner cannot live their own personal lie any longer and bail on their spouse. Everybody on both sides blames homosexuality without taking any personal responsibility for “setting up” this situation in the first place by being intolerant. Thus the spouse’s life is turned upside down and the children have to deal with something that they are absolutely unprepared to face. And, unfortunately, these days, that is one of the best-case scenarios. For nearly 30 years the AIDS epidemic has raged in our country. Oprah was shocked, when she read the book “On The Down Low:A Journey into the Lives of ‘Straight’ Black Men Who Sleep with Men,” that there were many married or “straight” men sneaking around having homosexual sex, some of them completely unprotected. Now, that doesn’t make these men very good people, but it is not them that we need to be concerned about. We need to be concerned for their unsuspecting wives or girlfriends who are in danger of getting AIDS every time they have sex with their closeted mate.

Once again, people want to blame the evils of homosexuality for all of these problems, but I say that a society that requires an entire minority population to hide itself – in broad daylight, I might add – only opens the door to such a danger. The homosexual minority is as diverse as our population. Every ethnic and racial group has homosexuals within its population. This points to a fact that the “it’s-a-choice” crowd ignores. If it is a choice, why are so many choosing it? If it is a choice, why are so many failing, in the long run, to stick with their initial choice? And I add one more thing for the “choice” crowd to consider. If you are truly heterosexual – that is, you never even once considered a homosexual experience – when did you make that choice? I would be willing to bet that you never were faced with that choice. It just didn’t appeal to you. I have never met a heterosexual person who claims to have made a choice to be anything other than what they are. Not one!

So I close where I began with the real question everybody should be asking themselves. Would you want your daughter to marry a closeted homosexual man? Of course you wouldn’t. So let’s allow the homosexuals to come out of their closets of fear and be who they are. It is really the best thing for all of us.

KEEP UP THE GOOD FIGHT!

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

Perhaps the true solution would be to adopt the European model where every couple first has a civil ceremony. That confers the legal and economic rights and responsibilities of what we know as marriage. Then, those couples who choose to do so can have their union sanctified by a second, religious ceremony. That would represent actual separation of the civil from the religious aspects of the union. And it would “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” The religious authorities would be free to impose whatever constraints that are consistent with the tenets of their faith — no same sex marriages, no inter-racial unions, no inter-faith ones, no sanctification of unions that cannot or do not intend to produce children, etc.

It seems to me that part of our dilemna is a semantic one. Marriage is such an emotionally loaded term, for both religious and secular folks. Some people who object to same sex marriage are just fine with the idea of civil unions. But is that not the equivalent of separate but equal? We all know how that one turned out. Words have power. Symbols have power. Having lived for a time in Las Vegas, where couples can do drive-up window weddings, I found those to be both cheesy and a statement demonstrating lack of seriousness at the importance of the union.

Like so many aspects of our recent, highly polarized politics, same sex marriage has become a wedge issue — one that has been used to keep people from finding common ground. It’s difficult even to discuss calmly and rationally. Those who are opposed use all sorts of scare tactics to make their points. And those scare tactics are blindly accepted by people who don’t want to do the hard work of really thinking about the issue.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. It is a matter of semantics. For some reason both sides of this argument seem hung up on the word “marriage.” If that is, in fact, a religious term, then government should do what it is called upon to do, preside over “civil law” and, as you say, offer civil ceremonies to any couple. There are plenty of churches that are willing to perform same-sex marriages, even in Houston, Texas.

However, on the other hand, if the states decided, as you suggest and I agree with, to deem all unions civil unions, we would hear an absolute roar of “foul” from the opponents of same-sex marriage.

I still ask the question that no one wants to face up to: Would anybody want to see their son or daughter marry a closeted homosexual? This simple question goes to the heart of the issue, and people should think it through without all the emotion and religious overlay that is passing for discussion on the matter today.

About

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE MEDIA? That’s a question I’ll be asking frequently. This old retired white Texas Democrat is a political junkie with the time to constantly monitor the news media and point out who’s really fair and balanced.

It is the goal of this site to shine the light of scrutiny on the very influential national news media as it “does its thing” during the course of this very important election. The plan is to critique political commentary shows every day, concentrating on content and slant thereof.

* Definition of “bullshit”

In Texas where many people come from a history of farming or ranching, we have often been known to holler "Bullshit!" This is because we all know that if you're going to buy a load of manure to spread on your fields, you really want to make sure the manure comes from cows. Cow manure replenishes the soil and makes things grow.
But if you're not careful, a cagey rancher may substitute a load of bull manure. Bull manure is completely worthless as fertilizer. It has no nutritive value as far as your fields are concerned. So if you paid for cow manure, but you got bull manure instead, you got ripped off!
Thus, "Bullshit" is another way, albeit rude, of saying "worthless." When someone hollers "Bullshit!", they are accusing someone of ripping them off or lying to them.